Page 57 - WhyAsInY

WHo are tHese PeoPle? (Part 2)
of the “Yaverbaums”), as she went from building to building, collecting the rents. After losing everything in the Depression, he and Grandma (I never heard her referred to as anything other than “Grandma”) opened a successful leather goods store on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn.
According to my father, although the Depression was a major cause of the loss of the real estate properties (and my grandparents’ chauf- feur), more important was the fact that my grandfather had a financial partner who cooked the books, stole from the business, and then disap- peared, leaving my grandparents with, among other things, a substantial tax liability. Dad believed that the partner’s defalcations and the result- ing tax problems ultimately contributed to my grandfather’s early death.
It is no coincidence that, like most of his contemporaries who lived through the Depression, my father was extremely fiscally conserva- tive—he never invested in anything more risky than a bank certificate of deposit—and, as I perceived it, he was very tight with the dollar. I believe, however, that his compulsive insistence on strict adherence to rules and principles, and his excessive fear of dealing with the govern- ment, came from his mother’s influence and, even more, from what he knew of the tangle in which his father’s partner had left the family. Prob- ably the best example of his insistence on abiding by the letter of the law came when, for the first and probably the last time, he took me to a neighborhood bowling alley. As we walked in, he noticed a sign on the wall that said “No Minors under Sixteen.” I was fifteen at the time, and my father couldn’t bring himself to adopt a pretense. Moreover, I could not convince him that he was being too literal, that the unstated qualifi- cation was probably “Unless Accompanied by an Adult.” We therefore went home.
My grandfather’s far more important partner was Grandma Rosa, who was the only grandparent who was alive when I was born. Grandma was a prototypical Eastern European grandmother: She was white- haired, a bit overweight, and usually dressed in black, with her thick ankles just about showing above her clunky black shoes. She was smart, independent, very proper, tough, and, as far as I was concerned, loving. As noted above, when my grandfather was living, Grandma collected
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